Public taxes have helped private schools for decades

May 1, 2012

Written by

@ToddBBatesAPP

LAKEWOOD — - Each day, thousands of private school students crack open textbooks, see a nurse or receive other services paid for by taxpayers.

About one quarter of the school district’s $133 million budget — an estimated $30 million — goes to help scores of private schools and their estimated 22,000 students. It’s all legal under laws and court cases decided over the decades.

But public funding of private education remains controversial in Lakewood and elsewhere.

“My personal view is you’re buying a lot of problems when you make available public funding to support parochial schools,” said Paul Tractenberg, a professor at Rutgers Law School in Newark and co-director of the Institute on Education Law and Policy there.

If a large percentage of the public-raised education budget is going to religious schools, “I want to hold the religious schools accountable,” he said. “I want to know how they’re using it, if they’re using it for religious purposes and not for secular education purposes. Then I want to be able to blow the whistle on that.”

Rabbi Meir Hertz, dean of Tashbar of Lakewood, a private K-8 school for Orthodox Jewish boys, said the public dollars for his school and students are used only for secular education. “Of course we’re aware of the regulations,” he said.

School districts handle requests for and distribute services, such as textbooks and nursing at private schools, according to Allison Kobus, a state Department of Education spokeswoman.

Districts also monitor the services, while the Executive County Superintendent reviews spending during the budget process, according to Kobus.

The law and court cases on public funding for private schools and students have evolved for more than a half-century, according to Tractenberg. In recent years, the U.S. Supreme Court has given the green light to spending tax dollars on a wider range of private school and student needs.

Some of the earliest U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the issue — testing the constitutional tenet on the separation of church and state — allowed very limited public support: for textbooks and transportation aid for parochial schools and students, Tractenberg said.

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“I would say in the last 15 to 20 years, there’s been real movement to retreat from that sense of a tall and thick wall of separation (between church and state), and so the court has found all sorts of ways to say, ‘Well, there’s still a constitutional law, and it doesn’t apply to here and here and here,’ ” he said.

Today, tax dollars can be spent on private transportation, instruction for low-income students, special education, supplementary and home instruction, English as a second language, textbooks, speech and nursing, among other services.

More than 150,000 K-12 students in New Jersey attend nonpublic schools and about 1.35 million attend public schools, according to state data.

Private schools save New Jersey residents about $4 billion a year in building and operating costs, according to a 2010 report by the Governor’s Study Commission on New Jersey’s Nonpublic Schools.

All schools serve the public good and taxes should benefit all of the public’s children, the report says. New programs are recommended to improve student access to private schools, including school choice (with tax credits for tuition, for example) and improved math instruction.

In New Jersey, the cost of transporting nonpublic students is limited to $884 per pupil this school year, according to the state Department of Education.

But with an estimated 22,000 Lakewood students attending private schools, that amounts to the lion’s share of the district’s $20 million transportation budget this school year. And the number of students is growing annually.

Title I federal funds for low-income children are provided to private school students under the child benefit theory, according to the state education department.

The theory, developed to address constitutional concerns, holds that the aid is to benefit children, not private schools.

When it comes to public funding for private education, however, Lakewood is an extreme case in New Jersey.

In Bridgeton, Cumberland County, and Long Branch — two similar-sized districts — a fraction of their budgets goes to private students and schools.

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Just $133,119 of Bridgeton’s $89.3 million budget in 2011-12 goes to services for 100 private school students, according to Jerry Vargas, assistant school business administrator.

In Long Branch, the figure is $283,247 of its $97 million budget, according to Peter E. Genovese III, school business administrator. A total of 367 private school students receive some form of public aid.

In the Toms River Regional school district, which has about 17,000 students, about $2.1 million of the $219 million school budget goes to services for 1,745 private school students, according to officials. All but about $300,000 of the $2.1 million is federal and state aid.

Tractenberg said some kinds of public funding for private schools and students are fine, as long as it supports secular education and not religious education.

“But you don’t know if you don’t monitor it,” he said. “New Jersey does almost nothing, for example, to regulate private schools.”

Kobus, of the state education department, said the agency recently began a statewide audit of the nonpublic program that should continue through this summer.

“The process is complicated, as not all nonpublic schools receive the same services within a given district,” she said in an email. “One school may take transportation, but not textbooks, another may take textbooks and nursing but not transportation, etc.”